The aim of this study is to discuss the diagnosis ADHD as a meaning-making discourse that is something more than just a diagnosis with a set of symptoms. I aim to discuss that the diagnosis is productive and can be seen as a means to control and to comfort individuals. The research was based on a method consisting of an idea analysis and a discourse analysis. I am using both a discourse analysis and a critical Ideology analysis as perspectives. These perspectives are also based on a general theory of late modernity.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, is described in Swedish mass media. The research question of the paper is "How was president Hugo Chávez portrayed in Swedish newspapers in the 2004 Venezuelan referendum?". The answer of this question provides information about how the mass media form the image of current political events which is an important aspect of power. The applied method and theory in the study is the critical discourse analysis.

This study explores the notion of class and social inequality as expressed in the Swedish election campaign of 2006 and in the reception of the Swedish conservative party as a "worker's party". Inspired by Fairclough's critical discourse analysis I have carried through an investigation of the debate. My sources consists in a collection of articles, mainly leader columns and contributions to the debate, from a selected number of Swedish newspapers.I found that an explicit discussion about class, or use of the concept as such, was largely absent. In cases where the concept occurred it was often used in a purely descriptive sense or dismissed as outdated. Furthermore, I have drawn the conclusion that the traditional understanding of class is being challenged by a discourse which aims at establishing a new understanding of social inequality as lack of paid work.I take my point of departure in the belief that class continues to be one of the most important bases of social inequality.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine how representations of identity construction are performed through the characters in the novel Snabba Cash by author Jens Lapidus. I examine what means the characters are using, and how the identity construction processes are related to the idea of modern society. For a theoretical background I use sociologist Anthony Giddens? theories regarding modernity and self-identity, to study general identity construction.

1.1 billion people are today living without sustainable access to improved water. The debate over the water sector has been dominated by the discussion over whether public or private actors are the most competent to manage it. In this paper the arguments pro and contra the two positions are presented to try to overview the debate and to try to find new ways to approach the question of the people living without clean water. By examining possible alternatives towards the discussion of public and private actors, it might result in some new approaches on how to move closer towards a solution. One alternative is local, small- scale projects which focus on the situation of the targetgroup in most need.

Narratives about UFO:s and extraterrestrials can be regarded as part of an everyday religiosity, yet the issue has been poorly studied outside an American context, within the discipline of Religious Studies. In this paper, I therefore seek knowledge about the further development of these narratives within the Swedish UFO-movement from the 1960?s until today. Influenced by social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss´ discussion about mythems as the smallest components of a myth, I argue that the stories which emerge within the Swedish context differ from the American ones. This difference consists of both loss of certain mythemes and the addition of others to this mythic complex.

Using a symbolic interactionistic analytical approach, this essay aims to study the socialisation of young women?s sexuality in treatment institutions for young women. Through qualitative interviews with staff members at said institutions, concerning their views on young female sexuality, and how they discuss sexuality with the young women in the institutions, my aim was to identify the socialisation of young women?s sexuality. I have also investigated how the staff experiences their own sex as an important factor in conversations about sexuality with young women, as well as the possible effect sexually mixed or sexually segregated institutions exert upon conversations about sexuality.

The focus of this master thesis is the library politics of the French Right wing party the National Front and the debate that followed the application of this politics. This qualitative study is divided into two parts where the critics to this politics represents one side and the adherents the other. The critics are composed by representatives from the French, Swedish and ? to some extent ? international library sector, while the adherent side is made up of politicians from the National Front and their adherents. The empiric material mostly consists of articles published in library, Right wing and daily press.

Den här studien undersöker skillnaderna i de sätt på vilka Junilistan respektive Socialdemokraterna officiellt talar om demokrati, samt tillskriver begreppet värde. Med en kombination av diskurs- och ideologianalys, med tyngdpunkten på diskursanalys, granskas det sätt på vilket de båda organisationerna, i idéprogram samt debattartiklar, använder demokratibegreppet vid diskussioner om EU som institution, samt vid resonemang om hur det svenska partiväsendet representerar de svenska väljarnas åsikter i unionen. Tanken bakom studiens fokus är att demokratibegreppet, med sin legitimitet och positiva värdeladdning, blir oerhört viktigt att knyta till sin verksamhet för att kunna visa på grundläggande demokratisk förankring i sina resonemang och därigenom vinna väljarnas bifall. En av studiens centralaste slutsatser är att de båda organisationerna i stor utsträckning talar om varandra. Det vill säga att när Junilistan talar i negativa formuleringar så talar Socialdemokraterna i positiva, utan att argumentationen på allvar möts i detaljfrågor..

The purpose of this essay is to examine whether the descriptions of Stalin's terror in history textbooks for high school changed from the 1950s until the 2010s. Since previous research shows that textbook content is influenced from different directions and that it dominates in teaching, therefore I want to find out what similarities and differences that exist in the textbooks. The survey is based on a qualitative approach because I want to have a profound picture of the descriptions of Stalin's terror. The results of the survey show that the number of casualties and the descriptions on the famine has changed over time. Furthermore, textbooks also found it difficult to distinguish between terror, politics and Ideology.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the attitude of teachers regarding including democratic behaviour when grading students in social science. The purpose is also to investigate whether the teachers consider there to be a conflict between the right of freedom of speech and the democratic values that the school is supposed to make sure the students have when they graduate. The study also investigates the problems political decisions encounters when going from theory to reality.The theory of Ulf Petäjä on why the freedom of speechs is important, Robert Dahls theory about the democratic process and Anders Sannerstedts theory about converting political decisions to reality is what this study is based on.The study was carried out at three different schools; Teleborg Centrum, Växjö, Dackeskolan, Tingsryd and Centralskolan, Virserum ranging from the spring of 2006 and the spring of 2007. The method used except from litterature studies was interviews with active teachers.This study shows that teachers don?t think it?s acceptable to grade students based on their political Ideology.

Purpose/Aim: The purpose of this essay is to see how the media, through the newspaper, "Vi föräldrar?, produces family and parental roles, and to investigate how the image changed over time.Material/Method: The material consists of a number of selected texts from the years 1968, 1988 and 2008. The method used is a discourse analysis based on the three level model by Norman Fairclough. The three levels are the text, the discourse practise and the sociocultural practise. In this study two of the levels, text and sociocultural practise, are used in analysing the texts.Main results: Family and parenting in the texts from 1968 can be linked to the structural functionalist theory in which the core family is central and women and men are assigned to specific roles.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine the view of funding and sponsorship of culture within Swedish governmental cultural policy. The main issue is to discover changes in attitude towards funding and sponsorship of culture by comparing the discourse of cultural policy in the 1970s with the discourse of cultural policy in the 1990s. The theoretical and methological starting point is Ernesto Laclaus and Chantal Mouffes discourse theory. Another theoretical starting point is Danish cultural policy reasearcher Dorte Skot-Hansens theories of the development of cultural policy in the Nordic countries, and Norman Faircloughs, of critical discourse analysis, theory of the marketization of discourse. Four governmental cultural policy documents, two from the 1970s and two from the 1990s, are analysed through a model loosely based on Laclaus and Mouffes idea of nodalpoints and elements constituting a discourse.

Bakgrunden till den här uppsatsen finns att hitta i min något idealistiska bild av nyhetspressens eviga sökande efter och uppdagande av sanningen. Den bilden, i kombination med den senaste tidens skriverier om bland annat Hagamannen och dennes offer, fick mig att fundera kring nyhetspressens eventuella konstruerande eller reproducerande av våldsbrottsofferdiskursen.Jag använde mig av Faircloughs kritiska diskursanalys då jag analyserade 36 nyhetsartiklar och nyhetsnotiser från Aftonbladet, Expressen, Svenska dagbladet och Dagens Nyheter, vilka alla hade publicerats under 2005/2006. Fokuseringen i undersökningen låg på den lingvistiska nivån i texten, det vill säga på ord, styckekombinationer och meningsuppbyggnader men även på de diskursiva praktikerna som fanns att finna i texterna.Det huvudsakliga som kom fram i undersökningen var att det inte finns en våldsbrottsofferdiskurs värd att tala om i svensk nyhetspress, den är alltid underordnad könsdiskursen och åldersdiskursen. Det finns inga våldsbrottsoffer i svensk nyhetspress, bara män och kvinnor i olika åldrar som blir utsatta för brott.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine how two novels written by the Swedish author Pär Lagerkvist have been received by the critics in the Swedish daily press concerning their contemporary anchorage. During the time these novels were published, Pär Lagerkvist, through his authorship, expressed a conception of and an attitude towards contemporary political directions. The first of the two novels, The Hangman, was published in 1933, and the second, The Dwarf, in 1944. A second aim is to examine how the two novels contemporary anchorage is reflected in the reviews. The final aim is to examine whether the criticism differs depending on the ideological view of the newspapers.